Shirley Jackson?s short story The Daemon Lover is included in the same anthology as her masterpiece The Lottery and shares many of the same thematic concerns as that novel, namely the critique of society for failing to protect women from victimization.
The Daemon Lover is told from the point of view of a plain 34 year old woman whose handsome, successful fiancé suddenly and inexplicably deserts her and disappears. The woman is distraught that her dreams of escaping her miserable, drab life in an urban apartment for a beautiful house situated upon a hill in the country will never be realized.
The woman?s fiancé is named James (Jamie) Harris and is never actually seen by any other character in the story. Even the woman doesn?t give much of a description beyond his tall and good looking and wearing a blue suit. She embarks upon a desperate search for his missing husband-to-be and the meat of the story is not so much where she looks and what happens as it the reactions to those she comes into contact with. Everyone treats her as though she?s made, as if James Harris is nothing more than a figment of her own imagination. Could it be that the woman?s obviously repressed sexuality has in fact created a phantom fiancé? The ambiguity of the story lies in the possibility that the woman descends into madness precisely because of her fear of realizing her dreams. The house on the hill in the country could be read as a symbol of unfettered sexuality which the woman desires, fears too much to allow to happen.
Or is there a James Harris? Is he real? By the end of the story the woman has gone quite mad so James Harris can be said to be real either way in the sense that he is the cause of her insanity. The story itself is too ambiguous to be read with any certainty one way or the other, but Shirley Jackson does give a clue. More than a clue, actually. In an epilogue at the end of the collection of short stories in which The Daemon Lover appears, Jackson plainly states a third possibility is, in fact, the truth. James Harris, it turns out, is neither man nor phantom.
He is nothing less than the devil himself.
This abstract was checked by WhiteSmoke Solution.
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